he Central Bureau of Statistics said: “The records of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA) indicate that the number of refugees registered with it in December 2020 amounted to about 6.4 million Palestinian refugees, of whom about two million are in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.”
In a report issued today, Sunday, on the occasion of the 75th anniversary of the Nakba, which falls on the fifteenth of May, the “Statistics” indicated that about 28.4% of the refugees registered with UNRWA live in 58 official camps affiliated with it, distributed as 10 camps in Jordan, and 9 Camps in Syria, 12 camps in Lebanon, 19 camps in the West Bank, and 8 camps in the Gaza Strip.
These estimates represent the minimum number of Palestinian refugees, given the presence of unregistered refugees, as this number does not include those Palestinians who were displaced after 1949 until the eve of the June 1967 war “according to the definition of UNRWA.” It also does not include the Palestinians who left or were deported in 1967 on the grounds of war and who were not refugees in the first place.
The report notes that the events of the Nakba of Palestine and the ensuing displacement constituted a major tragedy for the Palestinian people, as it represented and still is a process of ethnic cleansing, where an entire people was destroyed and expelled, groups and individuals from various parts of the world replaced it, and 957 thousand Palestinians were displaced from their villages and cities out of 1.4 One million Palestinians were residing in historical Palestine in 1948 in 1,300 Palestinian villages and cities. The majority of them were displaced to a number of neighboring Arab countries in addition to the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, in addition to the internal displacement of thousands of them within the lands that were subjected to Israeli occupation control in the year of the Nakba and what followed. after expelling them from their homes and seizing their land.
During the Nakba period, the Israeli occupation took control of 774 Palestinian villages and cities, of which 531 were completely destroyed and the remainder were subjected to the occupation entity and its laws. Palestinian, and the massacres continue to this day.
The report stated that the population in historic Palestine in 1914 amounted to about 690 thousand people, of whom the percentage of Jews constituted only 8%, and in 1948 the population reached more than two million, about 31.5% of whom were Jews, and between 1932 and 1939 the largest number of Jewish immigrants flowed in They numbered 225,000 Jews, and between 1940 and 1947 more than 93,000 Jews poured into Palestine. Thus, between 1932 and 1947, Palestine received approximately 318,000 Jews, and from 1948 until 2022, more than 3.3 million Jews poured in.
Despite the displacement of about a million Palestinians in 1948 and more than 200,000 Palestinians after the June 1967 war, the total number of Palestinians in the world reached 14.3 million at the end of 2022, indicating that the number of Palestinians has increased about 10 times since the events of the 1948 Nakba, about half of them (7.1). Millions) people in historical Palestine (1.7 million in the territories occupied in 1948).
Population estimates indicate that the population reached 3.2 million people in the West Bank (including Jerusalem) at the end of 2022, and about 2.2 million people in the Gaza Strip, and with regard to the Jerusalem governorate, the population reached about 487 thousand people at the end of 2022, of whom about 65 % (about 314 thousand people) reside in the areas of Jerusalem (J1), which were annexed by the Israeli occupation by force after its occupation of the West Bank in 1967.
Based on these data, the Palestinians constitute 50.1% of the population residing in historical Palestine, while the Jews constitute 49.9% of the total population and exploit more than 85% of the total area of historical Palestine (which amounts to 27,000 km2).
The report notes that the population density in the State of Palestine at the end of 2022 was about 899 individuals/km2, with 569 individuals/km2 in the West Bank and 6,019 individuals/km2 in the Gaza Strip, noting that 66% of the population of the Gaza Strip are refugees, so that The influx of refugees has turned the Gaza Strip into the most densely populated part of the world.
The Israeli occupation established a buffer zone along the border strip of the Gaza Strip, with a width of more than 1,500 meters along the eastern border of the Strip. Thus, the Israeli occupation controls about 24% of the sector’s area of 365 square kilometers, which contributed to a sharp rise in the unemployment rate in the Gaza Strip, reaching 47%. It turns out that the prevailing unemployment rates were the highest among young people in the age group 15-24 years, at 69% for the year 2021. This, in turn, contributed to the worsening and weakness of the economic reality in the Gaza Strip, which turned more than half of the population in the Gaza Strip into poor, as the poverty rate reached 2017 in the Gaza Strip 53%.
According to the report, the number of Palestinian and Arab martyrs since the Nakba in 1948 until today (inside and outside Palestine) reached about 100,000 martyrs, while the number of martyrs from the beginning of the Al-Aqsa Intifada until 12/31/2022 reached about 11,540 martyrs.
The number of prisoners in the Israeli occupation prisons reached 4,900 until April 2023 (of whom 160 are children, in addition to 31 female prisoners). As for the number of arrest cases, it reached during the year 2022, with the arrest of about 7,000 citizens throughout the Palestinian territories, including about 882 children and 172 females. A woman, while the number of administrative detention orders against citizens who have not been charged with any crime reached 850.
It is clear from the data that the number of martyred prisoners has reached 237 since 1967 due to torture or willful killing after arrest or medical negligence against the prisoners. Seven prisoners were killed, five of them as a result of medical negligence.
